William Orbit greets me in the studio of his central London home and immediately apologises for being a little “tired and wired”. If I had caught him at nine in the morning, before he had gone to bed, he would have been in a much sunnier mood, he explains.

It’s not just an ordinary studio and not just an ordinary home. Orbit’s workplace is in the basement of his splendidly appointed Georgian house, just a few doors away from the home, as of next week, of the former prime minister. You get the feeling that the dormant rock star in Tony Blair would enjoy dropping in for coffee. The studio is a formidable sonic playground: eight keyboards, five computer screens, a Fender bass propped up in the corner. Stacks of amplifiers line the walls. Many of them are redundant, Orbit tells me almost nostalgically, replaced in function by tiny computer chips. He fusses considerately over my tape recorder, for fear that it will not pick up his quiet voice, but informs me we are in an acoustically controlled environment that would be hard to improve.